The ‘chork‘, designed by restaurant chain Panda Express, is due to be released on November 10, to coincide both with the birthday of Chinese military General Tso and the release of their new dish, General Tso’s Chicken.

Essentially what’s we’re looking at here is two chopsticks that have been glued both to each other and to a fork in a wonderfully efficient design that looks a bit like a weapon from Mortal Kombat and sounds a bit like something a bored teenager might invent in the school holidays.

While it’s impossible to pinpoint precisely how long chopsticks have been making Westerners feel silly, their traditional use in China and the wider continent of Asia is a little easier to track down.

Interestingly, they were initially devised as cooking utensils, and weren’t used for the important business of chowing down until much later:

It wasn’t until AD 400 that people began eating with the utensils. This happened when a population boom across China sapped resources and forced cooks to develop cost-saving habits. They began chopping food into smaller pieces that required less cooking fuel—and happened to be perfect for the tweezers-like grip of chopsticks.

It has also been suggested that Confuscious, famous cultural philosopher and vegetarian, asserted that keeping knives on the table reminds eaters of the slaughterhouse, so there’s that.

So it would seem that it takes about 1600 years for a cultural shift in the way that chopsticks are used, meaning we’re due another one around about now.